ng the battlements of the heights--these one and all
must be actuated by the great spirit--that incalculable thing in the
universe which had produced man and soul.

And there in the starlight, under the wide-gnarled pines, sighing low
with the wind, Helen sat with Dale on the old stone that an avalanche
of a million years past had flung from the rampart above to serve as
camp-table and bench for lovers in the wilderness; the sweet scent of
spruce mingled with the fragrance of wood-smoke blown in their faces.
How white the stars, and calm and true! How they blazed their single
task! A coyote yelped off on the south slope, dark now as midnight. A
bit of weathered rock rolled and tapped from shelf to shelf. And the
wind moaned. Helen felt all the sadness and mystery and nobility of this
lonely fastness, and full on her heart rested the supreme consciousness
that all would some day be well with the troubled world beyond.

"Nell, I'll homestead this park," said Dale. "Then it'll always be
ours."

"Homestead! What's that?" murmured Helen, dreamily. The word sounded
sweet.

"The government will give land to men who locate an' build," replied
Dale. "We'll run up a log cabin."

"And come here often.... Paradise Park!" whispered Helen.

Dale's first kisses were on her lips then, hard and cool and clean, like
the life of the man, singularly exalting to her, completing her woman's
strange and unutterable joy of the hour, and rendering her mute.

Bo's melodious laugh, and her voice with its old mockery of torment,
drifted softly on the night breeze. And the cowboy's "Aw, Bo," drawling
his reproach and longing, was all that the tranquil, waiting silence
needed.

Paradise Park was living again one of its romances. Love was no stranger
to that lonely fastness. Helen heard in the whisper of the wind through
the pine the old-earth story, beautiful, ever new, and yet eternal.
She thrilled to her depths. The spar-pointed spruces stood up black
and clear against the noble stars. All that vast solitude breathed and
waited, charged full with its secret, ready to reveal itself to her
tremulous soul.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man of the Forest, by Zane Grey

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